Cleft Lip / Palate Support Group
Cleft is a congenital deformity caused by a failure in facial development during gestation. It can be treated with surgery shortly after birth with highly successful results. Cleft occurs in somewhere between one in 600 and one in 800 births. Cleft occurs in several severities and is divided in two major categories: cleft lip and cleft palate.
i was priviledged that my gran taught me how to speak. i am not perfect but i have no nasal sound. my voice sounds like a sqeuk toy, so some people still make fun. but i don't mind because i am the first in my country to make history. my surgeon, which is considered to be the best of the best made me speak on a xray thing before my big ops. so he could see how i speak, because i have no nasal sound, which he couldn't figure out. in 1997 it was discovered that i do not use my vocal cords to speak. they sit there looking "pretty". i use my muscles for swallowing to speak. i was the first that ever did that. (first ever discovered, so it doesn't mean im the only one, just that im the first to get written down). no believed it was possible. but here i am.
so my advise is to get a "normal" that you trust more than anything and get them to sit behind you and speak. and you mimic them. record them and yourself. practice practice practice. it wont happen over night.
Don't give up on speech therapy, it can be really useful even if the progress is not that fast.
Most likely, your voice won't sound "normal" whatever that may be for you (I get what you mean, I'm actually having trouble with that too).
Actually my speech therapist said that the real goal is to be intellegible (by limiting nasal air interference-dont know how to name that one); there's not much we can do to change the tone of the voice itself.